Jesus was never busy

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There are some people in my life that simply amaze me; they have a very full and rich life, but are able to take their time and enjoy it.

For example, one guy I know has an amazing family with a few young children, he holds a political position and also owns a quickly growing company. However, he always seems to have time to chat and is always fully engaged in whatever he’s doing at the moment.

Of course, I’ve seen plenty of the opposite where people are always hurrying from one thing to the next, and they never seem to be able to focus on the task at hand because they’re distracted by notifications and upcoming meetings. I think we’ve all been there, as I know that I certainly have.

A recent episode of the “How to Take Over the World” podcast focused on the life of Jesus, largely from a historical perspective. There were a lot of great insights in the episode, and I encourage you to give it a listen, but one concept really stood out to me: Jesus was never busy.

The host Ben Wilson shared a bit from Paul Johnson’s book “Jesus: A Biography from a Believer” where Johnson shared:

“Jesus was not thus overburdened by a program of specific appointments to teach. While always at work, he gives the impression of finding time to chat, albeit not about trivialities. There is never a sense of hurry.”

This shows up over and over again in scripture. Like other people in my life, Jesus got a lot of things done. He wasn’t “busy”, but he certainly wasn’t lazy. Finding that magic middle ground is an amazing place to be.

I think a big key to this is having a “mind like water“, where we’re able to respond appropriately to things as they come up throughout the day. If your inbox is clear and you know your priorities, it makes it easier to stay in the moment. It’s kind of like how I used Uber for many of my meetings back when we were in the office, because it allowed me to stay on top of things and prioritize effectively.

The other key is simply being in the right stage of life. I have some friends that are super organized and on top of things, and simply have chaotic lives right now with multiple children wrapping up their school year. At times, a bit of organized chaos simply can’t be avoided.

All of that said, it’s a great lesson to take from Jesus — you can accomplish a lot without having to be “busy” all the time.

I encourage you to check out Ben’s full episode for more.

Using AI to prepare for meetings

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I recently came across an interesting AI prompt that I’ll likely start using every Friday as I look forward to the week ahead.

David Cummings recently posted about some new AI use cases and they were all very insightful, but one I’ll be using a lot. He said:

Preparing for a Board Meeting
Last week, I attended a board meeting with 30 other board members. Prior to the meeting, we received a PDF containing the board agenda, a list of attendees, and governance items. I uploaded this PDF to ChatGPT and Grok, asking each tool to extract all the names and companies listed, then search the web for two to three news items or recent events about each person or company. Within a couple of minutes, they generated a bullet-point list of all the attendees, their companies, and relevant recent news. As a result, I entered the board meeting much better prepared, with a variety of topics to discuss during our dinner session.

I tried it for an upcoming meeting and the results were amazing!

I used this prompt: “Here is a list of people attending a meeting with me in a few days. Look at their names and companies and find any news items or recent events for each person or company.“

Below that, I simply pasted the list of people attending, copied directly out of my calendar. It was an ugly looking list, like this:

to: “[email protected]” <[email protected]>, Ron Jones <[email protected]>, “Johnson, Steven A.” <[email protected]> … (with a bunch more)

It had perhaps 20 names in the list, each with the formatting slightly different, and it parsed through and gave me a great list. For example, one person attending the meeting is with the Credit Union of Georgia, and it pulled this based solely on her email address (as part of the larger list that ChatGPT provided):

16 of the attendees had info similar to that, and there were just four that it couldn’t find any info for (and those were just free email accounts like “[email protected]”).

Do this weekly?

Now I’m considering doing this weekly as part of my weekly preview. I looked ahead at next week and gave it five names and email addresses of people I’d be meeting with, and it gave a great list of insights with links to details on the stories that mattered for each organization.

It’s imperfect, for sure, and the output should always be verified since AI models are known for sometimes making things up, but it’s a great start. If I see an interesting item about someone I’ll be seeing soon, I can click the link to verify and learn more.

Give it a try for yourself. Head over to ChatGPT (or the AI tool you prefer) and try that prompt with a few names and emails and see what happens.

Calendly versus Google Calendar Appointments

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We’ve used Calendly for years at GreenMellen to help schedule appointments with clients and leads and partners and anyone that we need to meet with. It’s an easy way to share your availability without having to do the back-and-forth dance of figuring out when both parties are available.

Last summer, Google added the ability to schedule appointments directly inside of Google Calendar. The feature was a bit lacking at first, but has improved a bit over time. I thought it was likely good enough for us to use instead of Calendly, but after some testing we’ve decided to stick with Calendly for now.

The tools are quite similar at a high level, and Google would have saved us some money (it’s included as part of our Google Workspace plan), but it had one big missing feature — buffers.

Buffers

My calendar stays rather full, so I love the ability to set a “buffer” between events when scheduling. I typically set a 15-minute buffer in Calendly, so if I have a scheduled meeting that ends at 10am, the first available slot will be at 10:15. It’s great!

Google Calendar has a similar feature, but it only looks at events scheduled through their tool when applying the buffer, which is super weird and not especially helpful. I noticed this when someone scheduled a meeting recently from 9:00 – 9:30, but I already had a meeting that started at 9:30. Why didn’t the buffer work? Some digging showed that Google doesn’t look at your existing appointments to buffer around, and that’s problematic for me.

Other than that, Google’s system is pretty solid. If you don’t have a tool like this and you’re already a Google Workspace user, it might be worth giving it a shot. However, if you’re looking to move from a system like Calendly, beware of this hidden gremlin that might show up at the wrong time.

Weighing your words against the labor of ink

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I recently listened to the “Shell Game” podcast series, hosted by Evan Ratliff. He describes the show like this:

What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are called “voice agents.” Then for the six months, he sent them out… as himself.

It was a fascinating show, and I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

In the final episode of the show, Evan references a 100-year-old article in the New York Times (view on NYT, or view Google Doc) about a shopkeeper who resisted getting a telephone for as long as he could, but he finally relented. It’s not a long article, at right around 1,500 words, so it’s worth giving it a read.

The focus of the article is about keeping humanity in business and “who are in revolt against the mechanisms of the city“. In the article they share a bit about why the slower pace can be advantageous, saying:

“If you use machines, you write a hundred letters where one will do, but not if each word is weighed against the labor of spreading out a drop of ink.”

It feels like something I say a lot on here (such as these thoughts from Blaise Pascal and Woodrow Wilson), though I’ll admit that the concept of a daily blog largely runs counter to that idea. If I were hand-writing all of these posts, they’d certainly come out a bit differently. Even so, I work hard to keep my thoughts concise and I weigh them carefully against the time needed to read them.

I may not always succeed, but keeping in mind the “labor of spreading out a drop of ink” is a valuable idea for all of us.

Short emails are a good thing

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There may be rare circumstances where a flowery email is appropriate, but 99% of the time you’re better off just getting to the point. Thanks to AI, many people are writing a short email and then using AI to unnecessarily expand it to make it more “professional”.

On the receiving side, more and more people are using AI to “summarize this email into bullet points”. Its reminds of this comic from Tom Fishburne, which is becoming shockingly accurate.

The end result is wasted effort on both sides, and likely a degree of miscommunication. It’s kind of like using Google Translate to translate from text from English to German, and then translate it back again. It’s likely going to have the same overall sentiment, but some things may get lost in translation.

Don’t be curt with your colleagues, but don’t feel the need to make emails unnecessarily long. Share what you need and move on. Short emails can be a great thing.

Memorize anything

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I’ve been working a lot on improving my memory lately, and it’s led me down quite a few roads. I’m trying some new techniques for remembering names, learning some interesting patterns for remembering numbers, and I’ve just build a new web app for helping to remember blocks of text.

The idea of this app is to teach yourself to memorize a chunk of text through a series of increasingly difficult reviews. This could be good for remembering:

  • Poetry
  • Scripture
  • Lines for a play
  • Information for a test
  • Other text that could be useful

Here’s a short video that shows how it works:

You can find the app and set up a free account at memorizeit.net. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on if something like this would be valuable to use or not.

Good notes are worth it even if the notes get destroyed

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I spend a lot of time working on my note-taking system, as it contains thoughts on future blog posts here, podcasts, books to read, and much more. It’s taken a long time to put together, but it’s become an amazing tool for me.

I create regular backups of it just in case, but what would happen if it were to get completely deleted? I’d be super upset, of course, but I still would have found the time that I put in to be worth it. The act of processing my notes is where a huge amount of my learning comes from, so losing the final result (while very painful) would still have been worth the effort.

Zettelkasten

I’ve mentioned a few times (such as here) that I loosely follow the “zettelkasten” method of note-taking. If you’re not familiar with it, here is what that is:

The basic idea of a Zettelkasten is a system where every idea/note is a separate card in a slip-box, and all of those cards are linked to one another. It was popularized by German sociologist Nicklas Luhmann, who had roughly 90,000 cards in his system when he passed away in 1998.

As such, I follow a number of zettlekasten-focused sites, and a recent post from Sascha Fast on zettelkasten.de opened up my thoughts on this topic. It was a long post, but here was his key line:

“If you would destroy my Zettelkasten, the work building it would be still worth it.”

I’m going to continue to back up my notes diligently, as losing them would be awful. However, the effort I’ve put in has been worth it for the learning alone, and being able to use the notes every day for additional research is just icing on the cake.

Where do you want to find your notes?

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Note-taking systems have changed a lot over the years. Like most people, I was a “sort notes by topic in folders” kind of guy for a long time, but back in 2020 I switched to Roam Research and it changed my whole philosophy of how to store notes.

I’ve changed systems a few more times for smaller reasons (to Obsidian, and then to Tana), but the basic idea is still the same. Rather than putting notes in folders, I organize and tag them in a way to make them more easily accessible.

In his book “How to Take Smart Notes“, author Sönke Ahrens explains the difference:

In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again? Most students sort their material by topic or even by seminars and semester. From the perspective of someone who writes, that makes as much sense as sorting your errands by purchase date and the store they were bought from. Can’t find your trousers? Maybe they are with the bleach you bought the same day at your department store.

This is why I make sure to always take the time to process my notes before I tuck them away. It’s easy to just toss them into your system to find them later, but then you end up with your trousers next to the bleach, which makes no sense. Related is the question of “what do you do with those pictures of slides?“, as many people just leave them where they took them, and hope to find them later.

It’s easy to say “take some time to process your notes”, but it’s certainly an additional commitment of time to do that. I’m the kind of person that likes to put in the effort to garden my notes, but not everyone has that kind of time. Thankfully, search features today allow you to find notes wherever you store them, so it’s not as big a deal as it used to be. For best results down the road, though, sorting things out properly will make your future self much happier.

Assumed execution

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I’ve shared a few times how the trust I have for my team can make my life so much easier. Specifically, if I email any of them with a task or question, I can just let it go and be confident that it will be taken care of (or that they’ll respond with follow-up questions, if needed). I don’t need tasks to check back in with them, which saves time and effort and is just awesome.

In Juliet Funt’s book “A Minute to Think“, she calls this idea “assumed execution”. She says:

If we worked in an environment of “assumed execution,” we’d need none of these. How much lighter our inboxes would be if we made an explicit pact with our email community to assume every email was delivered, read, and thoughtfully attended to. Let’s assume an even broader gesture of trust. Let’s say on the rare occasion when the ball got dropped, we’d reliably find out about it sooner or later and the price paid would be lower than we fear. If we could make this leap, we’d all reclaim hundreds of annual hours in needless reading and deleting. (However, many bosses enjoy and expect this kind of loop-closing, so get permission before altering this behavior.)

Of course, if I’m assuming execution on the part of others, I need to make sure to be reliable on my end as well. For me, the main key to that is inbox zero. While that applies primarily to email, I think all other inboxes count as well: text messages, LinkedIn messages, Slack messages, etc. Limiting your inboxes can help a lot, but for any that are available you’re responsible for being reliable. If not, the other party will lose trust in your ability to execute, and that’s a slippery slope.

Assumed execution isn’t an easy place to get to, but it’s a great place to be.

2D versus 3D content in meetings

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One eye-opening insight from Juliet Funt’s book “A Minute to Think” was her concept of 2D versus 3D content when it comes to communication. More specifically, she shared the problems that arise when we mix the two up and use the wrong form of communication for the type of content that we need to share or discuss. From the book:

“2D content is usually simple, yes/no, or fact driven. 2D modes of communication can include texts, emails, printouts, online chats, and so on. Reports and presentation decks are also 2D. Conversely, 3D content has nuance, emotion, or the opportunity for creative thinking. In 3D communication we exchange critical cues through our tone, pace, and gestures. We discuss ideas, ask complex questions, and connect interpersonally. 3D modes of communication require a live element—a phone call, meeting, video chat, or face-to-face conversation. Shared voice memos and recorded video exchanges can sometimes blur these lines, but the 2D vs. 3D distinction should guide you most of the time.”

The problems arise when you share 2D content in a meeting or you try to share 3D content via email. The results are easy to see coming:

“Share 3D content in a 2D medium and you compromise richness. Share 2D content in a 3D medium and you waste time. Your goal is to match the message with the medium.”

Finally, there is the challenge of mixed content. What if the discussion requires a bit of 2D and a bit of 3D? You could put it all in the meeting, but if you can push the 2D content to the edges it can be a win for everyone. Lastly, from Juliet again:

“2D vs. 3D awareness can reduce attendance on both sides of the meeting process. Collecting 2D information before a meeting can remove someone who would have only been invited to rattle off facts or data. On the flip side, publishing 2D open-source notes after the meeting helps us realize we have two choices in our communications: invite or inform. The availability of open-source notes also greatly relaxes the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) of those not chosen to attend, or maybe even changes it to our kind of FOMO (Finally Obtaining More Oxygen).”

I love her new definition of FOMO. The book talks a lot about our need for more white space in our lives (or “Oxygen”, in this case), and this new way of looking at meetings can be a helpful way to win back just a bit more of it.